While you can actually pay business card printers to use specialtextured paper, or even more exotic materials for your creative businesscards, there is a way to use Adobe Photoshop to simulate that kind oftextured style easily without the added cost. In this tutorial, we willtalk about the process of how you can design a textured style businesscard layout using Adobe Photoshop. Even if you are just a novice inAdobe Photoshop, you should be able to easily follow.

1. Thevery first step is of course, opening Adobe Photoshop and creating a newdocument. Setting this up is crucial as it will determine thecompatibility of your business card design for full scale printing. Thestandard settings for vertical type business cards are listed below, butyou may want to refer to your business card printer for their preferred settings.

a. Width: 61mm (55mm+6mm), the extra 6 mm are for the bleeds.

b. Height: 96mm (90mm+6mm) , the extra 6 mm are for the bleeds.

c. Resolution: 300ppi (minimum recommended for high quality printing)

d. Color Mode: CMYK

2. Once open, we need to setup the business card guides. First, f you donot see Rulers in your document press CTRL+R. With the rulers visible,drag a guideline from the ruler to the canvass by just clicking on itand dragging the mouse. As you drag the guideline, pay attention to itsruler location and approximate a 3mm distance from the edge. If you arehaving trouble seeing it, try zooming in by holding the ALT key andusing your Middle Mouse Wheel to see closer. Set it just like the imagebelow. Do this for all the sides of the business card design.

3. The guides should look like this:

4. Great! Now we are ready for some textures. For this particular businesscard, we are going to use an asphalt texture. So we paste in a nicefree asphalt texture like so. Note that we scaled the size down ofcourse to fit the business card. Also, we placed the background outsidethe bounds of our guides. This helps with the bleed as any minordiscrepancies in cutting will not matter because of the excess space.

5. Now, we darken our texture a bit. To do this, go to Image->Adjustments -> Curves. In the window that opens, adjust thecurve graph so that it looks a bit like the image below. We are justdarkening the texture a bit so that our text and other graphic elementswill stand our later.

6. Good. Now we will add some accents to our asphalt texture. Using thecustom shape tool we add an arrow shape into our canvass. To match theguidelines you see on the roads, we used a yellow color for the shapehere.

7. Now, press CTRL+J several times to duplicate our shape. Move theduplicates around to get a line of them across our design. Do not worryabout the spaces too much, we will correct that later.

8. Now, select all the shapes we created by CTRL clicking on them on thelayers panel. (Alternatively you can use the SHIFT key, click on thetopmost layer and then click on the bottom most layer). Once selected goto the attributes bar and click on the option “Distribute HorizontalCenters”.

9. Once done, merge all the layers into one, by right clicking on them andselecting “Merge Layers” in the context menu that appears. Change theblend mode of this newly merged layer to overlay to get a nice paintedon effect on the asphalt texture.

10. Next, duplicate our merged arrows layer by pressing CTRL+J. Flip it bypressing CTRL+T, right clicking on the duplicate and selecting “Fliphorizontal”. Position both arrow layers creatively as you see fit. Youcan even rotate them diagonally if you want. Here we just placed themboth pointing to an area like so.

11. Great! Now, create a new layer on top of everything by pressingCTRL+SHIFT +N. Using a soft and large black brush, add some darkerpatches on the borders. This allows the eyes to see more emphasize onthe center of the business card design. Once done here, NOW would be agood time to save your document as a TEMPLATE. Once saved as a template,save this again as the front or back of your design, whichever you wantto do first.

12. Now here we want to do the company or description side of the businesscard. So we type in the name of the business as well as its supposedproducts using the type tool. We have positioned them creatively to add amore interesting and distinct effect.

13. Next, we create a new layer and we use some shoe print brushes fromhere () to add a more streetwise effect. We then change the blend modeof this layer to Overlay as well. This finishes up the front part of ourbusiness card describing the services. Just save this front part assuch.

14. Now, load the template file we created earlier. Save it as a newdocument marked as the back of the business card. We now flip thepositions of our arrows so that it matches the front part. We now leavesome space at the center for the text.

15. Then, type in the important business card information for the backusing the type tool. Make sure to vary the color and sizes of the fontfor a more creative finish.

16. Now, we just do the same thing with the shoe print accents. We justcreate a new layer and paint up some shoe print shapes. We change theblend mode to overlay, AND we reduce the opacity to 50%.

FINAL IMAGE

Great!With that we have now finished our textured and creative business carddesign! Hope you learned a lot from the different tricks that we did

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